It is fair to say that the Sex and the City sequel has not, critically speaking, been well-received. Financially, it has not done especially well at the box office either.

But as far as many of the audience reactions and reviews are concerned, it's the greatest ever movie, or at least the greatest since Sex and the City 1. I saw it on opening night, at my local multiplex (six separate screens were showing it), fittingly located atop a mall. Gliding up the escalator past five separate handbag shops, it didn't take long to sense the tingling excitement wafting off the rows of people who had already been queuing an hour and a half on ridiculously high designer heels.

As expected, most were female – although as this is San Francisco, there were probably more men than the 10% audience share being claimed in some places. Having spent too long talking to people in the other queues, and not enough time queuing, we wedged into the front row with the screen towering terrifyingly above us.

From behind, there were whoops for each trailer; hearty laughter for whatever Katherine Heigl's next romcom of the week was, sighs of sympathy at some tear-jerking crap about Zac Efron and a dead brother. And when the film started, massive applause at the first sight of Carrie, more whoops at the SATC logo, and an enormous, lovelorn sigh at the sight of a walk-in closet. So: reviews be damned.

These were people having a good time because that was what they had come out of the house intending to have. Some jokes (the nanny's bra-lessness) you could hear falling flat, and the reaction to Liza Minnelli doing Beyoncé wasn't as raucously gleeful as the producers (or Liza) might have hoped. We left after 25 minutes of staring at the screen, losing the will to live. The rest of the audience had undoubtedly spent all day reading the same reviews being hungrily pushed around Twitter, each more scathing and dismissive than the last, yet caring not a jot. People had been planning a good time, and they weren't going to let a little thing like quality stand in the way.

I got an email three weeks before the opening from the ticket site I usually use, encouraging me to start making plans for babysitters and rounding up my best friends, because we'd hate to miss the opportunity for what would be the best girls' night out ever. That same site is now packed with glowing reviews - some mentioning bits of the film specifically, but most of them just talking about what a fab night out it was, and what a good time they had dressing up and going out with their friends – their own personal Carries, Mirandas and Charlottes.

The content came an easy second to the packaging. By the time people had made their arrangements, the cinema could have got away with showing us a blank screen with an occasional still of a walk-in wardrobe projected onto it.

But, as I said, I had to leave. And that left me in a difficult position trying to explain myself to my friends who had a whale of a time. It wasn't just that I thought the film sucked; I just hadn't the forethought they did to either go in a pack of half a dozen, or get pissed beforehand and sneak in some miniature wine bottles to pass the hours.

Instead, we acted on the first rule of the internet: if you don't like it, you don't have to be here. And we did what we should have done in the first place: drank cocktails, rather than watch them disappear down the gaping maws of four vacuous people I used to quite like.

It's something the studio should bear in mind when releasing SATC 3, or that rumoured prequel starring Miley Cyrus. They actually don't need to set the bar so high. Why bother with a script, or performances or reviews? Just a text message, a babysitting alert and a Marie Claire cover – and a three-hour shot of a wardrobe. That should do the trick.